- 46-
the ark." Yet another week, and he sent her forth a second time, when she returned
again in the evening, bearing in her mouth an olive-leaf. It is a remarkable fact, as
bearing indirect testimony to this narrative, that the olive has been ascertained to bear
leaves under water. A third time Noah put forth the messenger of peace, at the end of
another week, and she "returned not again unto him any more."
"No picture in natural history," says the writer already quoted, "was ever drawn with
more exquisite beauty and fidelity than this. It is admirable alike for its poetry and its
truth." On the first day of the first month, in the sixth hundredth and first year, "the
waters were dried up from off the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark,
and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on
the twenty-seventh day of the month, was the earth dried," - just one year and ten
days after Noah had entered the ark.
Thus far the scriptural narrative. It has so often been explained that the object of the
Bible is to give us the history of the kingdom of God, not to treat of curious or even
scientific questions, that we can dismiss a matter too often discussed of late in an
entirely unbecoming spirit, in these words of a recent writer:^20 "It is a question among
theologians and men of science whether the flood was absolutely universal, or
whether it was universal only in the sense of extending over all the part of the world
then inhabited. We do not here enter into this controversy; but we may notice the
remarkable fact that the district lying to the east of Ararat, where the ark rested, bears
traces of having at one time been under water. It is a peculiarly depressed region,
lying lower than the districts around, and thus affording peculiar facilities for such a
submersion."
But there is another matter connected with the flood so marked and striking as to
claim our special attention. It is that the remembrance of the flood has been preserved
in the traditions of so many nations, so widely separated and so independent of each
other, that it is impossible to doubt that they have all been derived from one and the
same original source. As might be expected, they contain many legendary details, and
they generally fix the locality of the flood in their own lands; but these very
particulars mark them as corruptions of the real history recorded in the Bible, and
carried by the different nations into the various countries where they settled. Mr.
Perowne has grouped these traditions into those of Western Asia, including the
Chaldean, the Phenician, that of the so-called "Sibylline Oracles," the Phrygian, the
Syrian, and the Armenian stories; then those of Eastern Asia, including the Persian,
Indian, and Chinese; and, thirdly, those of the American nations - the Cherokee, and
the various tribes of Mexican Indians, with which - strange though it may seem - he
groups those of the Fiji Islands. To these he adds, as a fourth cycle, the similar
traditions of the Greek nations. But the most interesting of all these traditions is the
Chaldean or Babylonian, which deserves more than merely passing notice.
(^)